Melt
by late-night-bloomer
Summary: Her need for him turned out to be greater than her need for AC.


Hahaha that summary is _way_ more suggestive than the actually story. Sorry about that.

For Nalu Week Day 5: Need

I don't own Fairy Tail. If I did this newest arc would have started with a Gajevy wedding instead of all this bloody teasing.

* * *

Lucy Heartfilia groaned in frustration as she flopped over again, for the hundredth time, hoping that this one time would be the time that she actually fell asleep in this awful heat.

Magnolia was going through a heatwave. Everyday seemed to be tortuously hot, no matter how light or short the clothes she put on. And to make matters worse, the temperature barely lowered when the sun went down for the night. Just walls of sweltering heat at all hours of the day.

Luckily, she could spend most of her daylight hours sitting pool side or sucking up the AC at the bar in the guild.

Unfortunately, her nights were spent in an air condition-less apartment, the temperature barely any cooler with her windows open and her single fan on high, pointed directly at her bed. Lucy turned her face toward the fan now to cool off as she flipped her pillow over, hoping that the underside was cooler than the heated top. It wasn't.

The sigh that floated from her living room was disgruntled as she felt. Natsu was annoyed that he'd been exiled to the couch after she'd kicked him from her bed earlier. His and Happy's house only had two windows and the place was even more stiflingly hot than her apartment. Not that the heat bothered the dragon slayer, no sir, he just didn't want to be alone at his house while Happy used the heat excuse to stay with Wendy and Charle. He'd shown up four nights ago pouting and Lucy couldn't bring herself to tell him to go home—his pout could be just a convincing as his sunny, happy-go-lucky smile—but it was only tonight that she'd finally convinced him that her bed was her bed and the couch was all he was getting.

Only, she was starting to regret that.

Somewhere along the way, over the years of their friendship, she'd gotten used to waking up to the pink-haired idiot in her bed. There were times she counted on it—like when she was injured and he'd stay to watch over her or when her father died and she'd began to have nightmares—and appreciated it. The mornings she'd woken up in the crook of his arm, held tightly to his side were embarrassingly some of the best mornings of her life, not to mention they'd sparked some of her favorite fantasies that she should _not_ be having about her partner.

It was because of those fantasies that she'd kicked him this time around. Natsu had taken to sleeping in just his boxers after she'd complained that all his clothes against her were making her hotter, instead of taking it as a subtle hint to sleep on the couch. Nope, her best friend saw nothing wrong at all with stripping down to his skivvies and hopping into bed with her. But Lucy saw a _lot_ of problems with it, starting with his hard pecs and ending with the niggling curiosity of what lay at the end of the pale pink happy trail that arrowed into his shorts.

And she wasn't go ready to go _there_.

As Lucy turned over again and dragged her sheet—the only cover she could stand in the heat—off with her feet, she realized that she'd slept easily the nights before with him next to her, hot and half-naked. Whether she liked it or not, she'd gotten to the point that she needed him to be comfortable in her own bed. She sighed in disgust as she rolled to her side and then onto her feet, shuffling to the kitchen for a glass of water. She eyed Natsu as she passed, noting his scrunched position on her small loveseat. After downing two glasses of ice cold water she poured a third and brought it back with her as she moved into the living room and stood over her partner, studying his sleeping face.

"Natsu." Lucy called as she pressed the bottom of her glass to his cheek. His face twitched at the cold, his eyes opening groggily.

"Lucy? What's the matter?"

"Get your pillow." She told him, hoping against hope that she wouldn't have to explain any further, already feeling a blush burning her cheeks.

"What?"

"Get your pillow. You can sleep with me." she said in a rush. Natsu's grin was immediate as he hopped up and grabbed his pillow. He all but marched her back to her bed, waiting as she set her water on the night stand and climbed in on the side closest to the window. Then he slid in next to her, hesitating only for a minute before he pulled her into his side, draping his arm over her back to bring her closer.

"Thank you. I don't know what it is but...sometimes I just can't sleep if I'm not beside you." he confessed to the darkness of her room and she felt herself melt, just a little bit.

Not trusting herself to speak, she hummed in reply, snuggling more comfortably into him. She wrapped her arm around his torso, squeezing him slightly.

Lucy was hot and pressed against a body that radiated heat at nuclear levels, but she was content.


End file.
